During one of my summers in high school, I took a few classes at a boarding summer school in Massachusetts. During the five weeks, I spent all of my day, every day with a select group of friends with whom I was able to build strong relationships that would inevitably lead to long-distance relationships when we all returned to our respective homes.
Back at home, the simplest means of communication defaulted to the instant messaging realm. Personally, I noticed that I was more inclined to keep in closer contact with the more physically attractive friends (ie. the ladies of our close group of friends). Since I had first met these people in a face to face environment, it was only expected for this to occur, I would try to get to know the more attractive members of our group. Almost every day, I would initiate mindless, random conversation with my friends. I noticed that it was easier to talk to and get to know the couple of friends who were online at the same times that I was online. With our online times frequently intersecting, I was able to talk to them more often take more interest in the friends with whom I shared more “proximity”. Wallace’s proximity attraction factor states that in a psychological space familiarity grows as the encounters increase in frequency. Furthermore, it became very difficult to get to know the people who weren’t around during the times that I was online, for the obvious reason that they just weren’t available for a conversation. To my dismay, I have yet to reconnect with these friends.
Meanwhile, I drawn to take greater interest in my frequent friends, I must have come to the realization that the common grounds that my friends and I shared caused them to be more identifiable to me. The more I knew about them, I had more characteristics to compare to my own personality, likes and dislikes. To further our growing attractions, my self-disclosures warranted their self-disclosures and vice versa. We were able to expand our common ground. Then, to further confirm Wallace’s attraction factors, the more I had talked to them, the more interesting they became which then in turn led to a stronger desire to interact with them more frequently.
Physical attractiveness may have initiated my interest in my long-distance friends but our common grounds and proximity on the instant messaging space allowed for a strengthening of our friendships and a growth in our attraction (interest) in each other. This however did not imply that these friends were the more interesting of the bunch. Some of them had terrible online personalities. Given their characteristics, it would have been quite simple to deduce the outcomes of the different online relationships I had maintained with my friends by looking at Wallace’s attraction factors.
http://comm245green.blogspot.com/2007/09/can-money-buy-love.html
http://comm245green.blogspot.com/2007/09/5-option-2-second-life-taking-over-real.html
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